Prokhorov says Russian economy already in recession

(Interfax – MOSCOW. April 16, 2013) Civil Platform leader Mikhail Prokhorov has criticized the state of the Russian economy on the eve of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s report in the State Duma.

“The economy is in recession. Fulfilling the taken social obligations is at risk – the deficit of regional budgets is over 500 billion rubles. There are no plans to increase labor efficiency and decrease economical expenditures. Many sectors of agricultural and engineering industries are powerless and not ready to compete in the framework of military and technical cooperation. Russia continues losing the ability to compete,” Prokhorov posted on his blog on Tuesday.

Prokhorov said that “the professional level of state authorities has great importance in the modern world.”

“It is impossible to work anymore in the conflict model, when the presidential administration, not the government has the real power. There can be two variants to develop effectively,” he said.

“The first ‘effective’ (but questionably constitutional): the president takes it upon himself to manage the government, combining his duties with prime minister’s,” Prokhorov posted on his blog.

Prokhorov said the second variant was “realistic”: “The government stops being political and gets to implementing long-standing reforms, the aim of which is to develop competitiveness, to increase labor efficiency and to decrease expenditures, to develop infrastructure and to create new jobs and start to reform housing and public utilities and thermal energy. This will lead to the improvement of people’s lives and to Russia’s return to the highest league of countries determining the rules of the new world economic space.”

“It is necessary that the president show political will and prime minister political wisdom to implement one of the two variants,” Prokhorov said.

“I’m guessing that we are unlikely to hear such a report of the government tomorrow,” Prokhorov wrote.